Burley tobacco harvesting remains to this day an essentially manual operation. Tobacco is harvested by first cutting plants near the ground. Five or six plants are then impaled upon a wooden stick having dimensions of substantially 1.times.1.times.54 inches. Tobacco-laden sticks are left in the field for several days until such time as the tobacco plants wilt. The sticks are then collected and transported to a curing barn. The sticks are placed or stored at spaced intervals on parallel rails in the curing barn. The inverted plants hang down from the sticks between the rails with the necessary spacing between the plants for on-the-plant curing of the leaves by natural ventilation.
As with any labor intensive procedure, the harvesting of tobacco in the manner described above is a relatively slow process. In fact, the harvesting and housing operation described above normally requires between 140-160 labor hours per hectare of tobacco. Further, with limited skilled labor available, the process is also relatively expensive.
Despite a clear need for a less expensive and faster harvesting procedure, up to this point in time, no commercially successful, fully automated apparatus or method of harvesting tobacco has been developed. The primary reason for this failure appears to be related to the fact that burley tobacco plants are highly susceptible to leaf damage and loss. This problem is the result of leaf turgidity, plant size and orientation of leaves on the plant. These factors clearly limit the extent to which any mechanical component can engage a burley plant and still provide effective harvesting.
A need is, therefore, identified for an automated harvester designed to rapidly, yet carefully handle and manipulate the burley plants and thus reduce leaf losses during cutting and storing to a level previously only achievable by the most skilled manual laborers.